Branding the allygator shuttle
This week we are opening our doors so you can see what is happening behind them. We’ll be looking at how our team members approached their work and created the products and brand that door2door is proud to present to the world. If you are a designer and interested in an in-depth look into how Daisy developed the brand, check out her article here.
During my time at door2door, I have worked on many brands. From rebranding ally to building the allygator shuttle brand from scratch, I’ve seen how door2door has grown not only in the strength of its products, but also in the strength of its brands. Of all our brands, I had most fun working on and developing allygator shuttle.
Since allygator shuttle launched in August, the response has been great. It has been wonderful to see how our riders, and those visiting the office, respond to visuals that were merely an idea in my mind a few months ago. Developing a brand takes both time and effort. You can read in more detail how exactly I worked through the brand development here, but in case you’re curious, here is a quick overview.
Stage 1: Taking a step back before taking a step forward.
When we were first introduced to Demand Responsive Transit (DRT), most of us had only recently heard of it. This meant that before developing any type of brand, we needed take a step back to better understand the market.
During our first sessions we developed user personas. Then we moved on to competitive analysis, positioning and developing a value proposition. Only after these steps did we come up with a brand name and begin developing visuals for the brand.
Stage 2: Choosing a brand concept
I knew in order to be competitive within the market, we needed to stand out from the already strong competitors in the market. In order to achieve this, I sat down and asked myself what each of our user persona’s would want to see, feel, and how they would want to appear and how we could integrate that into the brand. By brainstorming through these ideas, as well as using Casper, Apple and Squarespace as inspiration, I developed three potential concepts:
Ultimately, it became clear, however, that the strongest brand concept was the city is a jungle. This became especially clear after talks with our CEO, Maxim Nohroudi, who wanted to ensure that our vision of the future was represented in the brand.
At door2door, we partner with public transport operators to improve transit in the city. We believe that improved public transit infrastructure that is on-demand and fits citizens needs will mean that the cities of tomorrow could exist without privately owned vehicles. Because we worked so closely with our founder, we knew that this too had to be an essential part of our brand.
Stage 3: Developing our brand
Only after a few weeks of ideation were we able to develop our brand. The brand tone needed to match the cheeky, bold and fun theme of our channels. The jungle theme gave us a general palette: greens and blues. We used a bright, cool green that acted as the primary ‘pop!’ colour, a darker, warmer green to support it, and a dark blue as our background colour. Then we made sure that our typography (the lettering) matched the type of illustrations that we had chosen.
allygator shuttle today:
One of the greatest joys for me these past few months has been to see how well people have reacted to the brand and how well it fits with our message of a city free of personal cars.
Our marketing team has adopted my original concepts and made them their own, for example as Simão has done with the allygator adventures. I’ve more than once caught a stranger on the streets proudly using one of our tote bags.
And more than once our founders, Maxim and Tom, have heard that the brand is so strong that most public transport operators are surprised that ultimately our goal is to work with cities and not enter the market as merely a B2C brand! :)
It’s such a great feeling to see our brand, but also vision, being adopted by so many people around the city and I can’t to see where it will go next!
